Internet Alchemy

Now that RSSMaker has been upgraded, StartsHere has also been enhanced to take full advantage of the fat RSS 0.91 channels. You have the option now of viewing these as headline only or with full content. You can still customise the number of items shown and there’s a whole host of new configuration options on the way. There are now over 70 channels to choose from with many more being added all the time.

RSSMaker has been converted to produce RSS 0.91 files in addition to it’s normal RSS 0.90 output. The files are named as before but now have an XML extension rather than RDF. At some point in the future the RSS 0.90 support will be removed so this is a call to all of you giving us 2500 hits per day on these files to start using the new versions.

Network54, formerly known as NetBabbler, now supports RSS 0.91 as it’s syndication format. Even better than that, they are using OCS Directory format to list their hundreds of channels. Each sub category can display it’s own OCS file by adding ;xml=ocs to the URL. Instant channels – I like it!

We now support the new RSS 0.91 format. You can find the file here.

Netscape have updated RSS to version 0.91 and changed it’s name. It’s no longer RDF Site Summary but now Rich Site Summary. The format has some additonal elements such as item descriptions but one major change is the removal of the RDF starting element. It’s now pure XML instead of the bastardised hybrid it was before.

It looks as though Palm are about to build in support for WAP into the Palm VII which is good news for this fledgling protocol.

Interesting collection of statistics about the countries of the world. See if you can guess the most densely populated country in the world. (Hint: Singapore is second with 5,370 people per square km)

This report details how insecure the Windows 2000 Encrypted File System has turned out to be. Essentially to gain access to an encrypted volume you install a parallel version of Windows 2000, delete the user database and log in as Administrator. The system then happily decrypts the entire file system for you. Once again Microsoft demonstrates that they just don’t get it when it comes to security.

According to this report AltaVista has backtracked on it’s auctioning of search terms. It seems that they were swayed by the general public opinion that selling links made the service less trustworthy. Score one for the consumers.

Over at PC World the article to watch is the one about the way the major portals are moving away from the web as a medium to smaller devices such as the Palm or even small software devices that live on the desktop.